Murray Bookchin
THE MURRAY BOOKCHIN READER
Introduction
In the aftermath of the cold war, in a world that glorifies markets and
commodities, it sometimes seems difficult to remember that generations of people
once fought to create a very different kind of world. To many, the aspirations
of this grand tradition of socialism often seem archaic today, or utopian in the
pejorative sense, the stuff of idle dreams; others, more dismissive, consider
socialism to be an inherently coercive system, one that whose consignment to the
past is well deserved.
Yet for a century preceding the First World War, and for nearly a half
century thereafter, various kinds of socialism--statist and libertarian;
economistic and moral; industrial and communalistic-- constituted a powerful
mass movement for the transformation of a competitive society into a cooperative
one--and for the creation of a generous and humane system in which emancipated
human beings could fulfill their creative and rational potentialities. People
are ends in their own right, the socialist tradition asserted, not means for one
another's use; and they are substantive beings, with considered opinions and
deep feelings, not mass-produced things with artificially induced notions and
wants. People can and should throw away the economic shackles that bind them,
socialists argued, cast off the fictions and unrealities that mystify them, and
plan and construct, deliberately and consciously, a truly enlightened and
emancipated society based on freedom and cooperation, reason and solidarity.
Material aims would be secondary to ethical concerns, people would have rich,
spontaneous social relationships with one another, and they would actively and
responsibly participate in making all decisions about their lives, rather than
subject themselves to external authoritarian control.
After 1917 a general enthusiasm for the stunning accomplishment of the
Bolshevik Revolution pervaded almost all sectors of the international left, so
much so that the humanistic ideals of socialism came to be attached to the
Communist movement. In the 1930s young American intellectuals growing up under
Depression conditions, especially in the vibrant radical political culture of
New York City, cut their teeth on the version of socialism that the Communist
movement taught them. Their minds brimming with revolutionary strategies and
Marxian dialectics, their hopes and passions spurred by life-endangering battles
against a capitalist system that seemed on the brink of collapse, they marshaled
all their abilities to achieve the century-old socialist ideal.
Tragically, international Communism defiled that ideal. It committed
monstrous abuses in the name of socialism, and when these abuses became too much
to bear--the show trials of 1936-38, the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution, and
the Hitler-Stalin pact-- hopes that the Communist movement could usher in a
socialist world were shipwrecked. Many radicals, reeling from these blows,
withdrew into private life; others accommodated themselves to the capitalist
system in varying degrees, even to the point of supporting the United States in
the cold war. Still others, who did remain on the left politically, turned their
attention to more limited arenas: aesthetics, or "new class" theory, or
Frankfurt School sociology. Meanwhile, outside the academy, what remained of the
Marxian left persisted in small groups, defying the prevailing "consensus" in
favor of capitalism and accommodation.
Among the young intellectuals who had emerged from the 1930s Communist
movement, relatively few responded to its failure by attempting to keep the
centuries-old revolutionary tradition alive, by advancing a libertarian
alternative to Marxism, one better suited to pursue a humane socialist society
in the postwar era. It is a distinction of Murray Bookchin that in these years
of disillusion, disenchantment, and retreat, he attempted to create just such an
alternative.
Born in January 1921 in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants,
Bookchin was raised under the very shadow of the Russian Revolution, partaking
of the excitement that it aroused among his immigrant and working-class
neighbors. At the same time, from his earliest years, he imbibed libertarian
ideas from his maternal grandmother, who had been a member of the Socialist
Revolutionaries, a quasi-anarchistic populist movement, in czarist Russia. In
the early 1930s, as the United States plunged deeper into the Depression, he
entered the Communist movement's youth organizations, speaking at streetcorner
meetings, participating in rent strikes, and helping to organize the unemployed,
even as an adolescent, eventually running the educational program for his branch
of the Young Communist League. After breaking with Stalinism--initially, in
1935, because of its class- collaborationist policies (the so-called Popular
Front), then conclusively in 1937 during the Spanish civil war--he turned to
Trotskyism and later to libertarian socialism, joining a group surrounding the
exiled German Trotskyist Josef Weber in the mid- 1940s; his earlist works were
published in this group's periodical, Contemporary Issues. In the meantime
Bookchin was deeply involved in trade union organizing in northern New Jersey,
where he worked for years as a foundryman and an autoworker. (Due to his
family's poverty, he went to work in heavy industry directly after high school.)
In whatever factory he worked, he engaged in union activities as a member of the
burgeoning and intensely militant Congress of Industrial Organizations,
particularly the United Automobile Workers.
During the 1930s Marxian precepts had seemed to explain conclusively the
Great Depression and the turbulent labor insurgency that arose during the
decade, seeming to challenge the very foundations of the capitalist system. But
Marxist prognoses about the 1940s were glaringly unfulfilled. These predictions
had it that the Second World War, like the First, would end in proletarian
revolutions among the belligerent countries. But the proletariat, far from
making a revolution in any Western country under the banner of internationalism,
fought out the war under the banner of nationalism. Even the German working
class abandoned the class consciousness of its earlier socialist history and
fought on behalf of Hitler to the very end. Far from collapsing, capitalism
emerged from the war unscathed and strengthened, with more stability than ever
before.
The Soviet Union, for its part, was clearly far from a socialist society,
let alone a communist one. Far from playing a revolutionary role during the war,
it was actively involved in suppressing revolutionary movements in its own
national interests. Finally, American industrial workers, far from challenging
the capitalist system, were becoming assimilated into it. When a major General
Motors strike in 1946 ended with his co-workers placidly accepting company
pension plans and unemployment benefits, Bookchin's disillusionment with the
workers' movement as a uniquely revolutionary force was complete, and his years
as a union activist came to an end. The revolutionary tradition, he concluded,
would have to dispense with the notion of proletarian hegemony as the compelling
force for basic social change. With the consolidation of capitalism on a massive
international scale, the idea that conflict between wage labor and capital would
bring capitalism to an end had to be called into serious question.
To his credit, Bookchin, faced with these dispiriting conditions,
nonetheless refused to relinquish his commitment to revolution. Rather, the
revolutionary tradition, he felt, had to explore new possibilities for creating
a free cooperative society and reclaim nonauthoritarian socialism in a new form.
Anarchism, whose history had long intertwined with that of Marxian socialism,
argued that people could manage their own affairs without benefit of a state,
and that the object of revolution should be not the seizure of state power but
its dissolution. In 1950s America, in the aftermath of the McCarthy period, the
left generally--especially the anarchist movement--was small, fragmented, and
seemingly on the wane. Yet anarchism's libertarian ideals--"a stateless,
decentralized society, based on the communal ownership of the means of
production"(1)--seemed to be the basis, in Bookchin's mind, for a viable
revolutionary alternative in the postwar era.
Moving decisively toward this left-libertarian tradition in the middle of
the decade, Bookchin tried to free anarchism of its more dated
nineteenth-century aspects and recast its honorable principles in contemporary
terms. "The future of the anarchist movement will depend upon its ability to
apply basic libertarian principles to new historical situations," he wrote in
1964.
"Life itself compels the anarchist to concern himself increasingly with the
quality of urban life, with the reorganization of society along humanistic
lines, with the subcultures created by new, often indefinable
strata--students, unemployables, an immense bohemia of intellectuals, and
above all a youth which began to gain social awareness with the peace
movement and civil rights struggles of the early 1960s."(2)
Even as he embraced the anarchist tradition, however, Bookchin never
entirely abandoned Marx's basic ideas. In effect, he drew on the best of both
Marxism and anarchism to synthesize a coherent hybrid political philosophy of
freedom and cooperation, one that drew on both intellectual rigor and cultural
sensibility, analysis and reconstruction. He would call this synthesis social
ecology.
Even as Bookchin was moving toward an anarchist outlook, the American
economy of the early 1950s was undergoing enormous expansion, with unprecedented
economic advances that catapulted even industrial workers into the booming
middle ...
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